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Fight the pantomime populists denying climate change

It’s pantomime time! Donald Trump is in the White House. Paul Nuttall leads UKIP. Boris Johnson signed the Paris Agreement on climate change. Cindarella is playing at the Hackney Empire. And all the sea ice at the North Pole where Santa lives is disappearing. So join us next Saturday afternoon, 10 December, at Hackney Town Hall for a couple of hours of open air debates and take on the populists denying climate change, who claim to speak in the name of ‘real people’ and rubbish climate science.

Fact: up in the Arctic Circle, temperatures are rising so fast they hit an unheard of 20°C above average.

Fiction: Paul Nuttall, the new UKIP leader, defended his choice to speak about “so-called man-made global warming” while Cumbria was flooded, gloating that it was a cold winter, thus proving environmentalists wrong.

“Have you noticed that the ‘alarmists’ don’t call it Global Warming anymore?” he says. “No, they call it Climate Change, but only because their ‘hair-brained’ theory of Global Warming has fallen on its backside quicker than I did today when I slipped on the ice in Liverpool.”

Source: Kathryn Hansen/NASA

Fact: Donald Trump believes climate change is ‘mostly bunk’, according to his new chief of staff, Reince Priebus

Fiction: Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who signed the Paris Climate Agreement on behalf of the UK this month, said, “I see from the BBC website that there are scientists who say that “global warming” is indeed the cause of the cold winters we seem to be having…I merely observe that there are at least some other reputable scientists who say that it is complete tosh, or at least that there is no evidence to support it.

A year ago Britain signed the Paris climate deal, the first international step to tackling the climate emergency. But the Tories have chucked out policies that could slow climate change and the government is now adopting a dangerous energy policy and dolling out licences to energy companies to frack for gas as near as Leith Hill in Surrey, as well as Yorkshire and Lancashire.

This will create more greenhouse gases; contaminate ground-water and poison people and the environment.

The Town Hall square is a good place to choose. Opposite is Barclay’s Bank financing Third Energy which wants to frack in North Yorkshire. And Divest Hackney is calling on Hackney Council to sell off £42 million of shares in its Pension Fund held in fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil and Shell. It should divest like neighbouring Waltham Forest now.

So here’s our Christmas wish list:

Theresa May’s government to reverse all austerity cuts including those to green energy projects, and to ban fracking in the UK.